Love Has Its Ups and Downs

By Bonnie Rice

Love Has Its Ups and Downs: With a Bipolar Spouse is a manual for living with a husband or wife who has bipolar disorder. While there are many books about how to support a person with a mentai illness, Love Has Its Ups and Downs tells you how to do that without losing yourself in the chaos.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bonnie Rice
• Release date: Oct 9, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452349473

Bonnie Rice

Bonnie Rice spent years trying to be the perfect wife and mother, immersed herself in home organization and self-help, hoping that somehow she could have the tidy, quiet, middle-class life that always eluded her.After nearly twenty years of marriage she finally learned that it wasn't lousy housekeeping that was keeping her in chaos. It was the bipolar disorder that made her husband so critical of her attempts, and kept her walking on eggshells trying to please him.Stepping gingerly off the eggshells, she has been working on ways to deal with the disorder, keep her identity and dreams alive, and simply please the husband she married who is buried deep beneath the bipolar bear she sometimes lives with.Not wanting to waste the research, she is making her discoveries available to those who can use them. Enjoy the books--it took a lot of living to write them.

Book preview

Love Has Its Ups And Downs

Living with a Bipolar Spouse

Copyright 2010 by Bonnie Rice

Published by Getolife Publishing

Smashwords Edition

610 Payson Avenue

Quincy, IL 62301

Phone: [phone]

http://getolife.org

Cover Illustration: Troy M. Rice Jr.

Thank you for downloading this ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

Acknowledgements

This book would not have gotten past the rough draft stage without the help of a number of friends and family members.

I want to thank Michelle Ziemba for her work in proofing, editing, and making some good suggestions for this book. I may have finished this work without her help, but it would never have come out so well. I take full responsibility for any typographical or grammatical errors in this book. I admit to rewriting and adding substantial material after the edits were completed.

I also want to thank my family: my husband, for allowing me to talk candidly about his condition and our marriage; and our sons for putting up with us. It’s hard enough to have a father with bipolar disorder, but to also have a mother who is writing a book about it in her spare time (what’s that?) has to be pretty stressful.

I want to thank my son Troy Jr. for drawing the cover artwork.

I want to thank the members of my support groups who sent me ideas and encouraged me to finish this book and who kept me sane all the way through.

I want to thank you—for reading this book.

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C o n t e n t s

Introduction

Section 1: Put On Your Own Oxygen Mask First

Chapter 1: Boundaries

Chapter 2: Your Health

Chapter 3: Do It (For)Yourself

Chapter 4: Detach

Chapter 5: Family and Friends

Section 2: Now You Are Ready to Help Others

Chapter 6: Doctors, Drugs and Therapy

Chapter 7: Medication Simplified

Chapter 8: Support Stability

Chapter 9: Is It Really Just the Bipolar?

Chapter 10: The Bipolar Parent

Chapter 11: The World of Work

Chapter 12: Where Do I Go From Here?

Section 3: End Notes

Chapter 13: Our House

Chapter 14: My Bad Week

Chapter 15: Keep It Light

Introduction

Welcome to Love Has Its Ups And Downs. I’m sorry you belong here, but happy that you found me.

There will be people who tell you that life with a husband or wife who has bipolar disorder is simply impossible—and they will be right. Sometimes it really is impossible. If you can accept that this will not be the life you signed up for and that this disorder could become so destructive that you will be called upon to start your life over at some time—you take a lot of the pressure off and you just might be one whose marriage survives.

Maybe you’ve been wearing some rose-colored glasses, believing that if you ignore the disorder it will go away. That isn’t going to happen. Bipolar disorder is a progressive illness that will continue to get worse unless it is treated.

It is also a cycling illness that can trick you when your spouse cycles through a period of relatively normal stability. You may think you’ve got this thing under control, but the cycle continues and pretty soon you are in the middle of an episode, wondering what happened and how you are ever going to survive.

I don’t know where you are in this process, but I can assume you’ve got some questions or you wouldn’t bother to read this. I can also assume that you really want to make this marriage work or you would just file for divorce and get over it.

I’ve been where you are now. We went through the years of unexplained mood swings and chaos before the diagnosis, then all of the trial and error in treating the illness after that. I am not living happily ever after—that only happens in fairy tales. I have a very normal real marriage with all the normal problems. And I have a husband who has a serious mental illness to top it all off. But we are making it work, and I am happy to share with you just how we are doing it to give you some ideas how you can do the same.

There are some important things you need to know if you want to have a good life under these trying circumstances. I’ve learned these lessons from over 20 years of living with a bipolar husband—many of those years he was undiagnosed and untreated.

I’ve learned from online support groups where some really wonderful people have shared their lives and ideas. Search for BPSO (Bipolar Significant Other) on the Internet for an email support group. I am part of a Christian online support group at [e-mail] that has recently started a presence on SecondLife (an online world). You are welcome to join us.

I’ve learned from books, some of which are mentioned at the end of the appropriate chapter. But mostly I’ve learned by trial and error. Follow my lead, but skip my mistakes. It’s a long bumpy ride on the Bipolar roller coaster, but we’ll survive

That’s what this book is about. If that’s what you are looking for, welcome to the club nobody wants to belong to. You’re in good company.

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Section 1: Put On Your Own Oxygen Mask First

If you’ve ever traveled by plane, you’ve heard the instruction; If the oxygen masks come down, please put your own mask on first, then you can safely help others. You can’t help anyone if you stop breathing, right? It makes perfect sense.

You know it; I know it; everyone knows it; but doing it can be a problem. We always think, Well, I’ll be fine, and we don’t even notice that we might be ready to pass out from the lack of oxygen because we are so busy trying to put a mask on someone who is fighting every step of the way.

You need every ounce of strength you have to support someone with bipolar disorder. Allowing your strength to be diminished by not taking care of your own needs may turn out to be the thing that causes you all to go under together.

The first half of this book will tell you what you need to do to protect your own safety, sanity, and health. If you think this section should come second, you have a lot to learn. There are lots of books out there that tell you how to take care of someone with a serious mental illness, but most of them seem to assume that you can just drop everything and wrap your whole life up in caring for someone who may not even welcome your help. Following that advice may be good for your spouse in the short term, but if you use up all of your energy on the disorder and don’t have any left for yourself or your marriage, it won’t last.

Put On Your Own Oxygen Mask First! You can’t save anyone else until you save yourself. You are worth saving.

I will tell you how to stay physically strong and healthy. I will tell you how to stay emotionally healthy. I will tell you how to avoid being dragged under by the insanity that inevitably enters into this life. Maybe you will find other ways to solve your problems—and I’d be thrilled to hear what they are. Maybe you will use some of what I have to offer. I pray that it works as well for you as it has for me.

Maybe you will find that you have to end the marriage to save your sanity. It is not a failure if you can’t maintain the marriage. This is not an easy situation, and the odds are against you. But maybe you will be able to make your marriage work. Maybe you will find treatments that work. Maybe you will beat the odds. I hope that you can.

If you just use the ideas in this book to survive and escape with your own sanity intact, we will still be successful. Not every person with bipolar is marriage material and there’s nothing you or I can do about it. We didn’t cause this disorder. We can’t control another person’s behavior. We can’t cure an incurable illness. We are not gods, and we need to face that fact right now and get it out of the way.

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Chapter 1: Boundaries

You can’t control other people so you must control yourself.

What are boundaries? Why

Reviews for Love Has Its Ups and Downs

[pamelabarrett · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Bonnie Rice is writing from the heart about being married to a husband with Bipolar disorder and what it takes to stay married and raise a family in the chaos of the illness. She deserves much credit for putting this together in such an honest, concise and practical way. This is one of those books that I had to stop myself from underlining the whole thing; there is just so much good advice for living with someone with Bipolar illness, and I should know because my mother had it and I became her emotional caretaker until the day she passed away. I wish someone would have written this book earlier; it would have made my childhood and adulthood a little less stressful. In the very least it would have given me some perspective. I didn’t learn some these things until later in life. Saying that, still Bonnie gave me a few “Ah Ha” moments: for example, when the person with Bipolar illness says something mean and hurtful: to remember that it’s not about you—it’s about them. Another one was that “Bipolar affects memory.” There is nothing more frustrating then to be the one still reeling from a manic episode while the Bipolar acts like nothing happened.Love Has Its Ups and Downs is a great reference book for anyone who has a relationship with someone with mental health issues, and those who want to understand Bipolar illness. Bonnie uses humor in some places to illustrate facts, and her end of chapter questions and worksheets are very helpful. In one of the questions she asks you to remember a funny thing your Bipolar family member said: here’s a classic thing my mom said the first time I talked to her about boundaries, she said, “Boundaries are meant to be broken that’s how new countries are made.” In hindsight it’s funny, at the time not so much. This isn’t a one size fits all manual for marriages surviving Bipolar illness, but it is a starting place to help understand the necessity of boundaries, team support and putting together a workable plan for the health of yourself and your family. 5 stars. I read this on Kindle.